Food Feature: I saw the signs

When I hit the brakes, my tires squalled, and I nearly rolled the Passport. I yanked the truck into a U-turn and rode back a couple of hundred yards down Highway 29, just a mile or two outside Hartwell, Ga. I pulled onto an overgrown shoulder in the summer haze, my AC cranked. I dropped my sunglasses and squinted at the marker across the road.

“Center of the World,” it proclaimed.

Near it on the roadside was a little mound with another marker in a neatly mowed patch of lawn. The cyclical clatter of pickups with boats created a sloppy rhythm from the pavement. As the traffic disappeared down the highway, I grabbed my fountain Coke, stepped out of the car and crossed the road.

In front of the sign dragged numerous skid marks from other vehicles that had, possibly, also reconsidered their journey upon noticing the sign. The historical marker itself was older and more rusted than others you see in Georgia. It looked like a piece of history itself.

I looked around. Highway 29 lay quiet for the moment. The heat and glare and buzz of the North Georgia countryside engulfed me as I reviewed my whereabouts. A shady tree stand across the road. An industrial access street up ahead.

Farther off the road, directly behind the sign, stood the ubiquitous metal-siding-midsized-small-town-industrial-product- manufacturing-distribution facility. Its name, emblazoned on the front in equally ubiquitous blocky red letters, stood as a monument to noncommittal postmodern corporate marketing: FABRITEX. Did it make plastic binders? Boat hulls? The people that use them? Standing here, before the Center of the World, I could not venture a guess.

The sign and the mound rested by the roadside on the front lawn of the FABRITEX building. Was I on FABRITEX property? Did FABRITEX own the Center of the World? Did FABRITEX burn sacrifices and effigies here, on the shoulder of Highway 29, in the black, soupy Georgia night, to find favor with the Greater Forces?

I turned and walked to the mound; there was a second marker rising from it. The ill-formed granite hunk made an understated monument. Carved upon the face was the name “Ah-yeh-li A-lo-hee,” along with the symbol and acronym for Daughters of the American Revolution. I breathed a sigh of relief that the Center of the World remained in the safekeeping of the DAR. Perhaps a posse of doddering matrons would truck out here and burn black chickens at midnight on the equinox. Was this the vaunted secret source of the DAR’s power? Maybe the heat was getting to me.

Behind me, the sounds of rattletrap trucks with fishing boat trailers resumed on the highway. I glanced again at the granite marker, glistening in the afternoon glare. It explained succinctly that this was once a Cherokee assembly ground, the religious and economic hub of the Cherokee people. The Center of the World was the stage for market trades among Native Americans and white settlers alike. Councils, festivals and rites all centered on this location for as long as legend could tell. While there are no burial mounds in the vicinity, as you find elsewhere in the state, Native Americans still claim that it is a place of spiritual power, like a forgotten Taos.

Well then, here I was: the Cherokee equivalent of Stonehenge. A Dome of the Rock, less one dome and some nasty squabbling. I wondered how the Cherokee felt, managing their Harrah’s and bingo parlors, about the Benson Chapter of the DAR (c. 1923) performing crisp perennial manicures of Ah-yeh-li A-lo-hee a couple of times a year.

The sun burned into my neck. I looked around one last time. My Coke was rattling ice in a waterlogged paper cup. I made my way back across the highway. I climbed into the truck and sat for a moment. Not even a breeze arose to sway the tree branches above. For a moment I imagined the Center of the World 200 years from now.

The shopping centers will march slowly out from Hartwell, engulfing the site. It will be politely protected as an emerald median when the road expands to four lanes. Somebody will install a newer, better historical marker a few years before the revolution, and then, after that, most record of the site will be lost, leaving only an overgrown median surrounded by oblivious asphalt.

I pulled my keys from the pocket of my cutoffs and started the Passport. The wind picked up as if prompted. I dropped it into drive and spun the truck onto Highway 29, heading north into Hartwell, barely missing a pine green Ford Ranger.

A rock on the side of the road. There’s poetry in the fact that the Center of the World now only makes for a quirky photo op. Maybe there’s some lesson in knowing that the most important place on Earth might be gardened by the DAR.??